Friday, December 23, 2011

Charlton's Thought Prison

Do yourself a favor and read Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness--a new book written by the distinguished scholar (and reader of this blog) Dr. Bruce Charlton. I've read 500-page books before (e.g., Interpretation of Dreams) that taught me very little, but Dr. Charlton's 2-hour book might change your worldview. If asked, many people might say that the most serious problem facing the West today is economic, but Thought Prison makes the compelling case that the ideology of political correctness will eventually destroy us. According to Charlton, there is a small chance that we can beat it with a populist Right movement, but the more realistic response is personal defiance. What does he mean by this? I'm not going to give the whole thing away. Read the book and find out. Then comment here if you feel like it.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Hi from VM,

The Nazi Salute was made mandatory in Germany for a while. When Germans seen other Germans greeting each other that way, it would cultivate an environment whereby everybody thought everyone else was a loyal Nazi. This was implemented after an assasination attempt on Hitler.

When people use Politically Correct nomenclature ("African-America", "Latino", Gay or Lesbian instead of Queer or Fag, "undocumented immigrant" instead of "illegal alien", "climate change" instead of "global warming", "Entrepreneur" instead of "ticket scalper"--actually seen that one in the paper once, et cetera), everyone around them will think they are a socially-correct liberal and will be afraid to venture politically-incorrect-opinions around them in fear of offending them, and the social or professional retribution that person can inflict by "telling the boss" or describing the incident on their twitter account or whatever.

They kinda accomplish the same thing in my opinion. I do not believe the architects of political correctness just got lucky here. It was first introduced as a way of "not offending" these groups, because we were informed that black people were offended to be referred to as black, but preferred "African American" instead (which is a lie for many of them, as they call each other black and even a word denigrated as the most offensive epithet ever all the time). As it crept into the language of Americans, more word-"faux-pas" were introduced, again using the angle of not offending anyone by using the old words, which were now considered "epithets".

As more and more words were introduced, having a conversation about modern politics becomes impossible without having to use one of them or its "offensive" predecessor (such as "climate change" for "global warming", etc). So even a conservative who has to pepper his speech with these weasely words is suspected by his listeners as being a devotee to political correctness, and the impression is created that many more people agree with the ideology behind it than really do out of social fear of running afoul of a tattle-tale who will inform on you for venturing a un-PeeCee opinion.

This could not have happened by chance. It was cultivated in my opinion.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be." ~ Lord Kelvin